When a student from the lowest strata of society fights against all odds to prove her merit and reach the best educational institutions in India, are those institutions proving themselves meritorious enough to recognize her worth, to accommodate, let alone nurture her aspirations?

When a Dalit or Adivasi student becomes an engineer, doctor, business graduate or scientist, it should be a cause of pride for not just the family or the community but for the entire nation. Instead, why do our nation and its educational institutions reward their merit with discrimination, humiliation, violence and death?

This documentary is third in the series of our efforts to document caste-based discrimination prevalent in Indian higher education system resulting in large number of suicides of Dalit students in the Indian campuses.

The only son of a Junior Warrant Officer at Indian Air Force, Manish committed ‘suicide’ by jumping off from 5th floor of his hostel on 6th February, 2011.

The documentary is based on the testimonies of Manish’s parents and other family members who have yet to come in terms with his death and are fighting against the collective might of IIT Roorkee and Roorkee Police that, as usual, want to relegate their child’s death to ‘a weak student getting depressed for not able to cope up with rigorous academic environment of highly competitive IITs’ .

However the truth is Manish committed suicide, unable to bear the constant castetist assaults and abuses by his own batch-mates, criminal attitude of his hostel warden and IIT Administration that instead of acting on his complaints forced him to live outside IIT Roorkee, and perhaps also due to the complete shattering of his faith on IIT Administration that was supposed to treat all its students as equals and without using caste-lenses.

Merit did not die. It kills. It lies in wait and takes the life of dalit students after they have entered the prestigious educational hellhole – by refusing to let them pass, by standing between them and the future. Merit is a murderer.

The deaths of young people, the hopes of their parents and their communities, has forced the festering casteism and anti-democracy of the ‘prestigious’ educational institution into the public realm.

Their deaths remind us again that Merit has blood on its hands, that bloody Merit is the offspring of generations of privilege and exploitation, that Merit was fed on blood.

This is why we must read these suicides as protest, why we must reclaim these lives within the struggle against caste.

When did the language surrounding an educational institution become so vicious – elimination, testing, selection, exclusion, prestigious, hallowed, competitive, meritorious, premier, leading? A little less prestige and little more democracy would be welcome.

The anti-democratic nature of educational institutions is never clearer than when they begin to talk with smug complacence about how prestigious they are.

Within their hallowed portals, learning is not a broadening of the mind but a restriction of it. Political engagement will be systematically strangled at birth.

'Fuck off from this wing' - A message for SC/ST students in AIIMS. Courtesy : The Telegraph

In 2006, a 3 member committee under Prof S.K. Thorat, Chairman, University Grant Commission, was instituted by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India to look into the complaints of caste-based harassment against Dalit and Adivasi students at All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi.

The committee came with a report, on 5th May, 2007, that brought out the horrors of caste-discrimination suffered not only by the students but also by handful of SC and ST faculties in the Institute that is considered to be one of the country’s premier educational institutions.

However, the government did nothing and singularly failed to initiate any action to punish the perpetrators or implement any of its recommendations.

Three years later, Balmukund Bharti, a final year MBBS Dalit student at AIIMS, commits suicide on 3rd March, 2010.

He hanged himself to death in his hostel room after a failed attempt on his life just few days before.

The AIIMS administration came out with the standard version of ‘a student who went into depression as he was not able to cope up with the rigorous academic environment of AIIMS’.

The police also closed the case by forcing the father, who had come to take the dead body of his son, to sign on the statement that ‘he has nothing against AIIMS administration’.

But the truth is that Dr Balmukund Bharti was killed much before he committed ‘suicide’. Suicide was a mere formality.

Towards our efforts in exposing rampant caste-discrimination that is prevalent against Dalit and Adivasi students, in country’s premier institutions, we are uploading Prof Thorat committee’s report on AIIMS, New Delhi.

The committee was set up by Government of India, in September 2006, to enquire into allegations of differential treatment of SC and ST students in the above campus.

It is probably the first effort in Independent India to probe into the kind of caste discrimination suffered by our students in any institution of higher learning and therefore its report is a very important document for us to understand the nature of caste-discrimination and its impact, not only in AIIMS but in other institutions of higher learning too.

The committee came with a report, on 5th May, 2007, that brought out the horrors of caste-discrimination suffered at every level not only by the students but also by handful of SC and ST faculties in the Institute that is considered to be one of the country’s premier educational institutions.

The Hindu, (New Delhi, May 8, 2011)

In Dalit student suicides, the death of merit

by Vidya Subrahmaniam

He killed himself in his college library, unable to bear the insults and taunts. The suicide note recovered from his coat pocket charged his Head of the Department (HOD) with deliberately failing him and threatening to fail him over and over. Seven months later, a three-member group of senior professors re-evaluated his answer sheet and found that he had in fact passed the test.

When a student from the lowest strata of society fights against all odds to prove her merit and reach the best educational institutions in India, are those institutions proving themselves meritorious enough to recognize her worth, to accommodate, let alone nurture her aspirations?

When a Dalit or Adivasi student becomes an engineer, doctor, business graduate or scientist, it should be a cause of pride for not just the family or the community but for the entire nation. Instead, why do our nation and its educational institutions reward their merit with discrimination, humiliation, violence and death?

In our efforts to document caste-based discrimination prevalent in Indian higher education system resulting in large number of suicides of Dalit students in Indian campuses we have produced and uploaded two documentaries on two different cases of Dalit students’ suicides in India’s premier institutions.